Pricing Beauty: The Making of a Fashion Model

Ashley Mears writes in this 2011 book:

* They are now so unrepresentative of the everyday woman that they are considered offensive. They are far too young and slender, wearing a size zero and having dangerously low body mass indexes (BMIs), a problem that stirred international attention after the anorexia- related deaths of two Latin American models over the course of two show seasons. They are far too white, nearly exclusively Anglo looking…

* The call for diversity on the catwalk has not accomplished much.

* Bodies are racially coded, and the size zero look comes in one color: white.

* Ever since modeling work formalized into an occupation in the late 1920s, non- whites have worked at the margins of the industry.

* The curious phenomenon of the white, size zero look does not pervade all segments of the fashion market. It is most likely to appear in editorial, not commercial, fashion.

* When trying to describe the appeal and purpose of commercial models, producers in both the UK and United States made frequent references to sexual attractiveness, the “layperson,” and “middle America” several times mentioning “my mom,” “Kansas,” and “Ohio” by way of illustration. Putting these word combinations together gives us a working defi nition of a commercial model: (1) someone
considered sexually attractive by the layperson in Kansas; or (2) someone “your mom” in middle America considers pretty. Or, as Isabel, a casting director in London, says, “To be perfectly blunt, it’s the girls that do Victoria’s Secret, and Sports Illustrated, and JCPenney and Macy’s, you know, accessible to your kind of mass middle market where women want to look like, you know, women who are adored by men. You know that is bigger boobs, big hair, blonde, or at least some sort of like, you
know, glamorous Giselle type.”

In contrast to the “boring” commercial look, the “edgy” editorial model is “unique.” Some producers spoke of editorial looks and bodies with words like “sticks,” “abnormal,” and “freaks.”

* Being “not for everybody,” the scout explains, means not for the masses— not to entice them into consumption, nor to turn them on, nor even to make sense to them. That is because editorial looks are meant to appeal to the high- end fashion consumer and other elite producers; they are a wink and a nod to each other’s cultural competences to appreciate coded avant-garde beauty. They are largely chosen to impress field insiders such as magazine editors, stylists, and industry buyers.

* Whereas commercial models are hired to directly target and relate to consumers, editorial models are hired to communicate brand identities and to evoke ideas of luxury lifestyles.

* The editorial-commercial divide is therefore a proxy for how producers make sense of class distinctions among imagined consumers of looks. Editorial looks, as markers of elite taste, are more prestigious than commercial looks and their mass- market appeal. Visually we can picture fashion models as grouped along class hierarchies and their corresponding dress codes; there is the blue chip editorial in Prada and Gucci on one board and the commercial middle classes donned in Target knitwear on the other. The models in a Prada or a Target advertisement might have few concrete physical differences between them, but the labels featured in their respective advertisements do differ. In other words, the cannon largely determines the content. Vogue Italia says “edgy,” while Target is a dead ringer for “commercial.”

All of this is to say that within the high- fashion editorial market, anybody.org is rather far removed from the picture. Designers and directors selecting models for Fashion Week do not choose their editorial looks with the layperson or “your mom” in mind, regardless of how loudly she protests outside their gates.

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Nobody Controls The Narrative

I often hear the Jew-skeptical say things like, “I’m beginning to fear you’re losing control of the narrative, guys.”

Guess what, nobody controls the narrative because the narrative exists in your mind and mine and nobody controls our minds. There are people who control the megaphone but the megaphone can blare all day long and if it disagrees with my narrative, I’m not changing to accommodate the megaphone. The news can tell me all day long that Trump’s a wanker but I’m going to still vote for him. The media have been solidly on the left for decades and yet Americans keep electing Republicans. Why? Because we did not evolve to be gullible. The academic, media and cultural elites have been solidly left for decades and yet they have not been able to stop people voting Republican. The left controls the megaphone and yet Donald Trump still won the presidency in 2016.

Propaganda doesn’t change people’s minds. Spin doesn’t change people’s minds. School brainwashing doesn’t change people’s minds. It only gives those who want to think a certain way reasons to keep believing the way they want.

I notice that resentment is a primary characteristic of those who are failing at life. They particularly hate those who enjoy some measure of success, so they grab at their ankles and try to pull them down. If you are living your vision, however, detractors won’t get you down. Neither will you resent those who excel you.

Sometimes a resentment of Jews is simply a resentment of excellence.

Controlling the narrative is a delusion like controlling your reputation. Your reputation does not belong to you because it exists in the minds of others. So too with the narrative. It belongs to no one, it exists in the minds of others.

Complaining about other people controlling the narrative is like complaining about witches and other mythical beings. It’s the mark of a loser. A lot of people perpetually lose at the game of life and there seems to be no discernible reason for they are smart and hard working, but inside their minds, they are compelled to self-sabotage, and to assuage that pain of losing, they come up with theories that excuse their failures by saying it’s the fault of the Jews or the Freemasons or the elites. People want to blame everyone but themselves for their own misery. 

On the other hand, not all criticism of Jews or of Freemasons or of any group is off base. So how can you tell when criticism has merit? When it is empirical. Complaining about the Jews dominating the narrative, however, easily gets lost in the mist. Jews are the people of the book and of the movies and of the tele, but the narrative belongs to everyone.

My favorite metaphor for critics, trolls and enemies is “metaphorical tennis player.” The stronger their game, the better you have to be. I’ve played my best tennis against the best players.

From Waffourt:

4 Step Recap of How To Deal With An Enemy
Re-name this enemy or toxic person as your “Metaphorical Tennis Player.”
Start to think of them as someone who is here to actually HELP you to become stronger, better, wiser.
Ask yourself what positive qualities your “Metaphorical Tennis Player” is here to help you to develop – thanks to their chaos and resistance.
Try to be as thankful as possible that they are helping you to become a better player at the game of life.

Borrowed functioning is not a great place to be. If you can’t function right without your wife loving you and your friends supporting you, you’re not an adult. You don’t have the right to anyone’s love. You can’t control people’s love.

If you depend on your wife’s love, your mum’s love, your brother’s love, your kids’ love, you are going to be emotionally labile. You can’t order love. Various people make my show go — John, Lipped, Glib, Elliott etc, but if all of them turned against me, my happiness level would not dip for long. I don’t compromise the type of show I want to do even if my biggest fans disapprove. I listen to feedback and criticism and suggestions and then I employ my internal locus of control.

Related links:

https://www.wikihow.com/Deal-With-Enemies
https://www.forbes.com/sites/robasghar/2013/11/12/office-politics-7-tips-for-toppling-rivals-and-enemies/#116dc9901a33
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/platform-success/201303/how-manage-your-enemies
https://content.wisestep.com/defeat-enemies-kindness-tips/
https://www.notsalmon.com/2016/07/03/how-to-deal-with-an-enemy/
https://www.teledipity.com/the-five-secrets-succesful-people-use-to-deal-with-enemies/
https://www.learning-mind.com/8-best-ways-to-deal-with-your-enemies/
https://www.theschooloflife.com/thebookoflife/why-not-to-panic-about-enemies/
https://www.on-the-right-track.com/dealing-with-enemies/
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21359486
https://lifehacker.com/four-sneaky-ways-to-trick-your-enemies-into-becoming-al-1738663578

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Matt Forney Live (6/26/2020): Lauren Southern and Jaden McNeil in Prison Planet

Matt: “I’m not happy. There are a lot of things I am not happy about. Texas and Florida have closed bars… Then you have the cancellation attempt against Jaden McNeil. And we have the return of Lauren Southern.”

If the news makes you unhappy, deeply unhappy, then you have an approach to life that does not work. You are denying reality if you get fundamentally unhappy about things you can’t change and you can’t change the news. In the serenity prayer, we ask God to grant us the serenity to accept the things we cannot change. What goes unstated in that prayer is that we need to seek a way of life that develops rather than inhibits our serenity. For many people, this will mean consuming less news. The more time you spend getting upset about things you cannot change, the less happiness you will experience.

Matt: “I can’t get out Albania because of the lockdown. Maybe I will die here because I made the mistake of being an ex-pat in a time of pandemic.”

“I’m biting my lip so hard…trying not to fed post. There are not enough middle fingers in the world to describe about how I feel about this [lockdown] right now… It’s the flu. The mass wave of deaths never happened. The virus hardly killed anyone [in good health]. The average age of corona virus deaths is about 80. This is what we destroyed our economy for, so a few 80-year old could live eight months longer… This is psychological warfare designed to make you snap.”

If you snap, it is not because of the lockdown. It is because you have an approach to life that is not adequate to reality.

Matt: “It was coordinated… The elites want to make people totally miserable. Flu season is over [in the northern hemisphere]. Covid-19 is lethal to old people. That’s it… If there isn’t mass civil disobedience on the part of business owners who see through this bs… This is the last summer where we have our freedom before we are herded into mixed use developments and given UBI and microchips.”

“I take this personally because for a good portion of my life I’ve been poor, how am I going to pay the rent poor. Hiding from the landlady poor. Don’t know how I am going to be able to get gas poor… My employment has been destroyed by this nonsense.”

This kind of chronic poverty on the part of someone as smart as Matt is the result of self-defeating behavior aka negative compulsions.

Matt: “How many suicides have been caused by this lockdown? How many people will kill themselves [because Texas and Florida have closed bars]?”

If you snap, it is not because of the lockdown. It is because you have an approach to life that is not adequate to reality. You might need to connect to a power greater than yourself.

Matt: “There is only so much abuse the brain can take.”

If you can’t take the lockdown, you are weak. Everybody should keep three months of food and have at least three months of savings on hand. The amount of turbulence you can handle without hurting yourself or others reflects your level of maturity. Adults should be able to deal with stress without hurting themselves and others.

Matt: “How many people who you thought were solid dudes are just going to snap and kill themselves over this?”

Forney touches on an important truth. Civilization often hangs by a thread. Our sanity often hangs by a thread. Covid-19 won’t destroy civilization or your sanity, but it will test it and reveal it.

Matt: “People often comment about how resilient I am in the face of internet trolls… This has personally affected me yet. What I can extrapolate from this is the future and even I feel hopeless. Am I going to be able to make it through five to ten years of this? I think I’m cracking a little. What about people who are close to the edge? So, in conclusion, f— Greg Abbott, f— Ron DeSantis, f— lockdowns, f— the medical dictatorship, f— nurses, f— doctors, f— science.”

This is the embodiment of an attitude to life that doesn’t work. You’re getting enraged about things you cannot change. What works better is to put your effort into understanding why people act the way they do. And what’s even better is to focus on changing the things that you can change — mainly, yourself.

Ryan Landry has published a new book — Masculinity Amidst Madness — and it is the best selling book Matt’s Terror House has released.

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The Tyranny of Distance: How Distance Shaped Australian History

Historian Geoffrey Blainey writes in the 2001 edition:

* The wide ocean parting Australia and Europe impeded the export of Australian commodities. The same wide ocean was also a barrier to the migration of people from Europe. Whereas one powerful cause of the United States’ rapid growth of population in the nineteenth century was its closeness to Europe, the most powerful brake on Australia’s growth of population was its distance from Europe. Historians of the United States often overlook this obvious fact, preferring to concentrate on the natural resources of their land and the enterprise of their people as the dynamos of national growth. In Australia we also overlook this obvious fact, concentrating on Australia’s deficiency of natural resources as the only reason why Australia was not a serious rival to the United States.

* Of all the countries in the new world to which Europeans in mid-century were flocking, the two where new land was dearest were Australia and New Zealand, the two countries most distant from Europe.

* In the egalitarian bushman’s society of the nineteenth century, education was often seen as a form of snobbery and a way of social advancement which broke up the camaraderie of working men.

* Australia’s emergence in the nineteenth century as one of the most sports-crazy nations of the world…was more to be expected in a society dominated by men…

* By the mid-nineteenth century thousands of Australian working men, in their quest for improved conditions, were giving a higher priority to shorter working hours and longer leisure than to higher wages…[because they frequently did not have families to support].

* Without the intervention of American military strength in 1942 Australia would probably have been invaded or blockaded by Japan. Furthermore, in stemming and then repelling the Japanese thrust in New Guinea and the Solomons, America played the major part and suffered heavy casualties. …While in the nineteenth century Australians had erected, by public subscription, many statues to General Gordon, the British general who lost a skirmish on the banks of the Nile, it was perhaps significant that they erected no statues to General Douglas MacArthur.

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The price of checking your ‘white privilege’ may be high

Jonathan Tobin writes: “American Jews have elevated social justice above every other aspect of Jewish life. However, they have forgotten that justice is impossible without the rule of law. Checking their privilege in this manner is itself an example of how disconnected they are from reality. They’re also having trouble understanding that they are still living in a world where security is a necessity for Jews, and that their community cannot defend itself with good intentions and virtue signaling.”

June 17, Tobin wrote: “Civil-rights groups used to understand that the best guarantee for the defense of liberty was to protect free speech, even when it came from people they opposed. But now groups like the ADL are on a crusade to shut down speech and, based on the records of social-media companies and their left-leaning algorithms, the most likely victims are conservative voices, including Jews like Dennis Prager or Ben Shapiro, whose widely shared posts infuriate their opponents.”

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